Securing Airtel WiFi Broadband Connection

I recently upgraded my home Airtel broadband connection to WiFi so that the three PCs and one Palm PDA in my home can access the Internet simultaneously. Airtel’s engineer had set up a secured network and left the WiFi router (beetel 450BXI) to its default SSID of ‘Broadcom’. 

A few days later when I visited my father’s house, I noticed that Airtel had setup the WiFi router there also as ‘Broadcom’. Since this led to access conflicts on my PC, I decided to change my router’s SSID to something unique (‘fl’). With some good telephone support from the Airtel engineer, I was able to accomplish this by myself.

Two days later, I noticed that the router had slipped into ‘Broadcom’. Given that the router was originally setup in secure mode, I was quite puzzled to notice that it was now slipping into unsecured mode. I accessed the router’s admin page and repeated the procedure for setting up ‘fl’. All was well for a day. However, the next day, the router again went into ‘Broadcom’ and unsecured mode. I kept trying to fix the problem by myself but, surprisingly, hours of Google search yielded no useful information. Eventually, I had to repeat the setup of ‘fl’ everytime the router went into ‘Broadcom’.

Tired of doing the same thing repeatedly, and frustrated with the lack of success with self-service, I called Airtel. They promptly sent an engineer who upgraded the firmware on the WiFi router. Seven days later, my router has not slipped into ‘Broadcom’, so I think this solution has worked.

The nature of the solution and the speed at which it was implemented tells me that Airtel must have received this complaint several times. As a result, I’m now questioning my earlier conclusion that my problem was unique on account of the lack of any useful information on the Internet. By posting the problem and solution here, I thought that someone else facing a similar problem can immediately figure out what the solution is. 

PS: Airtel’s support is good, so I don’t think anyone should have problems with the basics of setting up a secure WiFi network in the case of Airtel. But, if you need any assistance there, please leave a comment, I’ll do another blog post with those details.